Woman stands by the man who tried to get her killed
Ex-Bill producer gets 17 years’ jail
A TV producer’s long-term partner is standing by him despite his attempt to hire three hitmen to kill her, a court heard yesterday.
Script editor Hazel Allinson, 68, is supporting ex-Bill boss David Harris, also 68, as he begins a 17-year sentence over the murder plot.
She will not accept that her partner of 28 years wanted her dead so he could live with his 28-year-old prostitute lover.
But an Old Bailey judge heard Harris was able to “manipulate” Ms Allinson even in jail.
Judge Anne Molyneux told Harris: “You provided correspondence to the Probation Service to demonstrate that Ms Allinson is supportive of you and does not accept your criminal intentions. The author of the presentence report considers that she has become caught up in the fantasy that you created to defend your actions.” Harris claimed the meetings were “research” for his crime novel Too Close To Kill – though he has not written a single word. He continues to deny his guilt, the court heard yesterday, and has all the hallmarks of “social anxiety and a narcissistic per-sonality disorder”. Ms Allinson met Harris while they worked on The Bill in the 1990s. With two failed marriages, the recovering drunk quickly moved in with Ms Allinson and was given £50,000 of her money when the couple downsized and moved out of London to the country. As she fought serious illness and family loss, he frittered her cash away on a prostitute girlfriend 40 years his junior. HITMAN BID David Harris wanted partner dead When the money ran dry last year, the court heard Harris tried to hire three would-be killers to murder Ms Allinson, offering them £250,000 that he did not have.
Her death would have seen him pocket the life insurance and sell their £1million home to spend his final years with Lithuanian lover Ugne Cekaviciute.
The first man that Harris approached, tyre fitter Christopher May, tried to warn Ms Allinson of Harris’s plot to stage a “car jacking or mugging gone wrong” but she ignored him.
The second, American Duke Dean, known as “Zed”, went to the police and handed Harris over to an undercover officer posing as the third assassin. Judge Molyneux told Harris: “For your pipe dream, for your obsessive infatuation with a young woman, Ms Allinson, who had protected and nurtured you, was to die a painful and terrifying death in an isolated spot. “Her death was to fund your life. You had used her until she had outlasted her usefulness to you. “All you wanted from her was that she should die and you should inherit her money. That Ms Allinson did not die is not due to a lack of preparation or intention to withdraw on your part but to the unwillingness of those requested to kill.” Harris, of Amberley, West Sussex, showed no emotion as he was taken down to the cells. He will serve half of his sentence for soliciting murder before release.